French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani on feminism & freedom

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Terry Gross** (0:14)
This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. You probably won't recognize the name of my guest, novelist Leïla Slimani. So I'll start by telling you about her place in the literary world. She won France's highest literary award, the Goncourt Prize. She was the chair of the judges for the International Booker Prize. That's Britain's highest literary award for fiction written in the English language. The international version is for fiction translated into English.
When Emmanuel Macron was the French president, he wanted to appoint Slimani minister of culture. She declined, but accepted the position as his representative to French speaking countries. Slimani is Moroccan, but completed her education in France where she continues to live. She's written a trilogy of novels inspired by three generations of her family. Her father served as Morocco's minister of economics in the late 70s, and became a bank president. Her mother was one of the first women doctors in Morocco. Her family is a doorway into larger issues of colonial and post-colonial Morocco, like government oppression, women's rights, the tensions between Muslims and Christians, and sexual criminalization. You risk imprisonment if you have sex and you're single, gay or lesbian, or engage in adultery. Slimani wrote a non-fiction book exploring the impact of that law on women's lives, and it figures into her new novel too.
The complete trilogy is now published in English in the US. The final volume, her latest book, is titled I'll Take the Fire.
Leila Slimani, welcome to Fresh Air.
I'm guessing that you wrote a trilogy based in part on your family, because the generations of your family reveal so much about colonialism, race, gender, religion, sexuality, parenthood, siblings.
Is that right?

**Leïla Slimani** (2:08)
Yes, it is, of course.
I think I decided to write this trilogy also because I've always had the feeling that literature was maybe the only way of doing justice to people like people from my family, people with a mixed race heritage and with a very complex identity, because I found it very difficult for me to explain to others who I was. When I was in France and I was explaining that I was Moroccan, but also French, that I was raised in a very complex and multilingual family, people would not really understand my identity. And it was the same in Morocco, where people would look at me as very Francophone or very Westerned. And I was always frustrated about that. I wanted to do justice to them. And I thought that the only way was to write a novel and to write a trilogy, because I really needed also to understand where all this comes from. And for me, all this comes from the relationship between my grandmother, who was French, and my grandfather, who was Moroccan.

**Terry Gross** (3:22)
Yeah, your grandmother was from Alsace, which kind of transferred back and forth between French and German control.

**Leïla Slimani** (3:30)
Yes, exactly. Her childhood was not easy also. You know, her father, he was born German and then he became French, and then he was German again during the war. My grandmother, she would speak German, and I think that at school she learned German and she learned French later. So for her also, identity was a very complex and difficult issue.
And I suppose that Alsacienne, she was sometimes despised by other French because they would look at them, at those people like potential traitors. They were not always sure of their loyalty.
And that's a theme that has always obsessed me. Because when you are double, when you have two identities, people are always questioning your loyalty. On which side are you? If there was a war, with whom would you fight?

**Terry Gross** (4:26)
So what insights has that given you into today's culture of tribalism and identity politics? I don't know how strong that is. In France, where you live part-time, and now you live part-time in Portugal, too.
But it's sure strong in the US.

**Leïla Slimani** (4:45)
Yeah.
I think that all the characters in the novel, they are very tremendous characters. It's not easy for them to be who they are, because sometimes they don't know who they are. It's difficult for them to know, are they French or Moroccan? Are they Muslim or non-believers?
Do they have to make a choice? Are they forced to hide what they think, what they are, like for the character of Mia, who is hiding her sexuality? So they are facing very difficult choice and very difficult situation. But at the same time, what I like with these characters is that they are all trying to find a certain sense of freedom, of emancipation, to be the only one to define their own identity, to invent themselves. So I think I'm not being just melancholic, saying it's difficult to be double. But I'm also trying to convey something else is that, yes, of course, it's difficult to know who you are. And we must be very, very wary of all the people who are forcing us to choose a side. You know, I think belonging, of course, can be very comforting, but it can also be dangerous. So this question of belonging, for me, is a very moral question. It's an ethical question.